Elizabeth Shafer is a writer, artist, and retired lawyer. Her chapbook, WELLSPRINGS, was published by The Finishing Line Press in 2019. She was a contributor in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2014. In her art she has worked in various media such as fresco, printmaking, pastels, and watercolor. She has focused on oil painting and, most recently, encaustics. She had a solo art exhibition at the Saugerties Public Library in 2019. As a former lawyer, she continues to serve on the Board of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, and is a member of the Saugerties Conservation Advisory Commission. She lives with her husband and their dog on their sheep farm in Saugerties, New York. Social Media: Instagram @elspeth2122026
PRAISE:
“Molten Arts and Memories” is Elizabeth Shafer’s eloquent testament to her blended life as a poet and a painter. In one of her opening poems she describes her experiments with the ancient and potentially dangerous art of encaustic. The painter is literally playing with fire, and that image is threaded throughout the book. The poems are intimate, they probe deep, and hold a stunning amount of heat. They’re ringed with magma —molten, simmering under the surface, boiling forth in unexpected corners of our overheated earth and in the shadows of history and in memory. Shafer’s topics range wide — there is war, despair, joy, loss, regret, and of course there is always always beauty. The lasting impression is of a poet/painter driven to live in truth, to hold her hand to the fire, and to flinch at nothing.
–Josepha Gutelius, author of Rapt Meat and To the Perfect Love Which Prepares a Table Beyond Us
Elizabeth Shafer’s poems are like living landscapes in a molten world, fused with encaustic heat and luminous colors, aglow with pain and glory. But as a collection, Molten Arts and Memories also becomes a lyric memoir with operatic overtones, reflecting on family tragedy, the “glad fast dance” of motherhood, endless war, Anna Karenina at the train station, and the many players in an examined life.
—Jan Alexander, author of Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization
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